Marvin Minsky, pioneer of artificial intelligence passes away

Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of artificial intelligence passed away on 24 January 2016 in Boston, United States due to cerebral hemorrhage. He was 88.
He was an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) who had created robotic hands that can manipulate objects. He also had developed new programming frameworks in this field and wrote several texts on AI and philosophy.

About Marvin Minsky

• Minsky was native of New York and had earned a degree in mathematics from the Harvard University after returning from service in the US Navy during World War II.
• He had co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project (AIT) in 1959 along with John McCarthy. Now AIT is known as Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AIL).
• Famous inventions: In 1963, he had developed first head-mounted graphical display.
• He had developed the confocal microscope which is considered as a predecessor present time’s widely used confocal laser scanning microscope.
• He had developed the first Logo turtle with the help of Seymour Papert. In 1951, he built SNARC, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine.
• His work also has inspired the creation of the personal computer and the Internet.
• Famous books: Minsky has authored The Society of Mind, The Society of Mind, Perceptrons and A framework for representing knowledge.
• Awards and Honours: AM Turing Award (1969), it is the highest honour in computer science.
• Japan Prize (1990), IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1991), Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001), Dan David Prize (2014).
• He was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum (2006) and also was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems’ AI’s Hall of Fame (2011).

About Artificial Intelligence (AI)

•  John McCarthy is being credited with coining the term artificial intelligence in 1955. He had defined it as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.
• In other terms, AI is the computer science field that studies the synthesis and analysis of computational agents that act intelligently.
• It deals with creation of computers along with software that make machine hardware capable of intelligent behaviour.

Month: Current Affairs - January, 2016